The preface states that this book is intended for people who are using
the Mac, and OS X, because of its foundation in the UNIX environment.

Part one is a basic introduction to the system. Chapter one, entitled
"Inside the Terminal," tells how to access the command prompt (using
the "Terminal" terminal emulation application), with some alternative
settings you can use. Search functions are covered in chapter two,
which is a bit odd, since files, filesystems, standard directory
features, and alternative filesystems aren't dealt with until chapter
three. The boot process, options and preferences for customization,
and program invocation are explained in chapter four. Chapter five
outlines account creation and services. Installation of printers,
plus print management function, is in chapter six. The X windowing
system and virtual network computing (VNC) is in seven. Chapter eight
lists a few outside applications, and nine mentions some of the other
operating systems and emulators you can run.

Part two is for programmers (and open source devotees). Chapter ten
provides a fairly simplistic overview of the concepts of compilation
and enumerates a lot of utilities, while chapter eleven discusses
libraries, headers, and frameworks.

Part three covers packages, which are basically applications with more
complicated installation. Fink is one development system, reviewed in
chapter twelve, and MacPorts is another, outlined in thirteen. The
creation of installation packages is discussed in chapter fourteen.

Part four deals primarily with other system functions. A listing of
server software and tools is in chapter fifteen. Chapter sixteen
notes a number of standard UNIX system management utilities, plus
tables of system variables. Some oddities of Mac versions of the
Perl, Python, Ruby, and Java programming languages and libraries are
explained in chapter seventeen.

This book will get you a basic start into the UNIX side of the Mac if
you are new to the OS X operating system. It will also provide
certain explanations of the UNIX world if you are used to working with
a Mac. In either case, you will probably need to start lining up
additional resources fairly soon after your introduction to the other
system. (The work will be slightly more useful if you are a
programmer as opposed to user.)